Part 36 (1/2)
”It was a young boy I used to know,” she answered, ”named Michael Furey.
He used to sing that song, The La.s.s of Aughrim. He was very delicate.”
Gabriel was silent. He did not wish her to think that he was interested in this delicate boy.
”I can see him so plainly,” she said, after a moment. ”Such eyes as he had: big, dark eyes! And such an expression in them--an expression!”
”O, then, you are in love with him?” said Gabriel.
”I used to go out walking with him,” she said, ”when I was in Galway.”
A thought flew across Gabriel's mind.
”Perhaps that was why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl?”
he said coldly.
She looked at him and asked in surprise:
”What for?”
Her eyes made Gabriel feel awkward. He shrugged his shoulders and said:
”How do I know? To see him, perhaps.”
She looked away from him along the shaft of light towards the window in silence.
”He is dead,” she said at length. ”He died when he was only seventeen.
Isn't it a terrible thing to die so young as that?”
”What was he?” asked Gabriel, still ironically.
”He was in the gasworks,” she said.
Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person a.s.sailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish l.u.s.ts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.
He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation, but his voice when he spoke was humble and indifferent.
”I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.
”I was great with him at that time,” she said.
Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:
”And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?”
”I think he died for me,” she answered.